


Boys of Summer

by stereonightss



Series: Racket Boys [2]
Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Cotton Candy Love, F/F, First Kisses, Gen, Old Flings, get-together, let the girls have fun, they deserve some peace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-16 05:06:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28576464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stereonightss/pseuds/stereonightss
Summary: Relena turns her face to the sun, lets it drape light and shadows long and golden on the loose length of her hair. The boardwalk is humming with life, with the voices of children and carnie callers and the clash of competing music—and beneath it all, the sea, churning and constant, a soft-foamy touch of white noise that just about cuts through her jittering nerves. She takes a long breath of salt air.Relax, she says to herself,center, she says.You’ll do fine.Hilde owes Relena a great dept of gratitude - after all, the tireless lawyer got the five problem children off on some serious felony charges. A bouquet might have sufficed. But Hilde has a better idea.
Relationships: Relena Peacecraft/Hilde Schbeiker
Series: Racket Boys [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2093805
Kudos: 5





	Boys of Summer

Relena turns her face to the sun, lets it drape light and shadows long and golden on the loose length of her hair. The boardwalk is humming with life, with the voices of children and carnie callers and the clash of competing music—and beneath it all, the sea, churning and constant, a soft-foamy touch of white noise that just about cuts through her jittering nerves. She takes a long breath of salt air. _Relax_ , she says to herself, _center_ , she says. _You’ll do fine._

She came straight from work. There wasn’t time for changing; always unpredictable Hilde texted her ‘ _danny’s clam bar 6pm yeah?’_ after weeks of silence, and it was sudden and Relena had to check her pride and yet, despite herself, it was easy to give in. To respond with a thumbs up, to leave her briefcase in the office, to roll her stockings up and stick them in the center console of her old Volkswagen. To reapply her lipstick in the rear-view mirror, giddy with the absurdity of it all. A date-not-date. Ostensibly, a meeting with an old college friend all tangled up in the landmark case of Relena’s career thus far—a case that pushed at the boundaries of her professional creed, that asked of her ‘ _how much can you give?_ ’ and took some more besides. She’s tired. She looks tired and feels tired and maybe one evening on the boardwalk, away from her desk and her papers, isn’t the worst thing to do.

Even as the sun starts to slip past the horizon, the heat of the day lingers. Relena sighs. She gave up sensible heels when she left her father’s law firm years ago, but today she manages to resent even her comfortable flats. Sitting on the boardwalk bench outside Danny’s Clam Bar at five-thirty on a Friday in mid-July, sweating in her silk blouse and pencil skirt, Relena feels less like an ivy-league lawyer and more like a lost, lonely child.

Two slim, soft hands slip over her eyes, eclipsing the red disk of the sun. Relena gasps and cups the hands on instinct, but doesn’t pull them away. Behind her, Hilde giggles.

“Guess who?”

Hilde’s hands are small and soft and Relena can’t help but giggle in answer. The feeling trips up her sternum to catch warm at the base of her throat. She turns, pulling Hilde’s soft little hands down to her own shoulders.

And then their eyes meet.

Relena clears her throat.

“Hello,” she says, uncharacteristically shy.

“Hi there,” Hilde chirps, eyes bright and smiling.

A breeze off the sea lifts their hair, and in the tumbling murmur of the waves, Relena feels herself ebbing. She feels herself flowing, shoulders softening under Hilde’s slim hands, tension drawing out with the tide.

“Bet your’e hungry,” Hilde says.

“I am,” Relena says, amending, “a little,” as her stomach flits with inexplicable butterflies.

“I’m starved!” Hilde says. “C’mon, let’s go.”

Relena follows, keeping a step behind. Not counting the days in court, it’s been nearly a year since they’ve seen each other, eleven long months since the last cup of coffee (light and sweet with pie a la mode for Hilde, black with one sugar and unaccompanied for Relena), since the last little bit of gossip traded over their old college friends. Most of the other girls on the volleyball team are married with children by now, mellowed out with a decade of real life behind them. Older, some of them more colorless, wider around the hips and waist, predictable but content. But not Hilde—no, Hilde was the same as ever. The same big eyes, fox’s eyes full of mirth and mischief, a fox’s chittering giggle tumbling out her lips between expletives and one-liners and idiosyncratic slang, a lightness to her movements like a dancers (and in fact she was one, when they were children), all of her dancing from the quick, expressive lips to the pale blue eyes to the slim, clever hands.

Relena smiles, remembering the night they took her father’s Thunderbird convertible to the city, to Soho, to walk from boutique to boutique, ‘just to look’ Hilde said, though by the time they tumbled laughing into the little red coupe Hilde’s purse was fat with lipsticks and earrings and travel sized bottles of perfume and anything else her clever little hands could swipe between one eyeblink and another.

Hilde slips one such clever hand into the crook of Relena’s elbow. It’s a humdrum miracle how easily it fits there, how the difference in their heights makes Relena’s shoulder just the perfect height for leaning on. They walk the worn wood of the boardwalk toward the old concession stand. Hilde leans and gestures wide with her free arm as she fills in this and that she’s picked up, gossip about town and the lives of their old college friends, ex boyfriends and ex girlfriends and ex bosses and Relena is rapt, so quietly taken that she doesn’t process the fact that Hilde’s ordered food for the both of them right up until the squat, graying man behind the counter is handing them two overdressed hotdogs in grease-logged paper trays.

“Oh, please, let me,” Relena says, fumbling at her purse for her wallet.

“Not a chance,” Hilde says with a wink. “Tonight is on me. I mean it.”

At Hilde’s insistence they take their hotdogs and a pile of brown paper napkins to the edge of the boardwalk. They kick off their shoes (Relena tucks her flats into her purse) and drop their bare feet into the cooling sand.

“It’s been a hell of a year, Lena,” Hilde says, eyes on the rumbling ocean. “I thought those kids were gonna go away forever. Five good lives in the trash.”

Relena takes a slow, careful bite of her overstuffed hotdog and chews slow, deliberate, stealing glances at Hilde’s uncharacteristically somber profile.

“Hmm,” she says, turning the sand with the pads of her feet. “They almost had us, it’s true.”

Hilde laughs, wry and brittle and sneaks a glance in return.

“I know what you went through to make sure they didn’t,” she says, voice husky and low. “I don’t know how I’ll ever thank you, Lena. I know it’s not in your nature to, you know.”

Relena straightens her posture on instinct. The hair on the back of her neck stands up. Just the thought of what channels her brother went through to get the information she needed to defend those five young men makes her feel restive and tight. Edgy, as though someone can hear.

“It’s over now,” she says, setting the paper tray down on her outstretched legs.

Hilde looks at her, and their eyes meet, and for a tense moment the enormity of the last year looms heavy and wall-like between them. And then Hilde scrunches her nose and lets out a little giggle that ends in a snort, and it’s as though the sun breaks over her face. Relena feels her shoulders drop, her anxiety once again deflated by the flippant quirk of Hilde’s lips.

“Ya got something right here,” Hilde says, licking her thumb.

“Here?”

“Let me. C’mere.”

Hilde swipes her thumb down Relena’s cheek, then pops the thumb between her lips and licks off the smear of ketchup. It’s Relena’s turn to wrinkle her nose in half-disgust, and they laugh, giddy with nerves and paradoxical shyness and the intensity of it all.

“I wanna show you something, Lena,” Hilde says as she stands. “Come with me.”

Once again Hilde slips her hand into the crook of Relena’s elbow, tugging gently as she steers them into the riotous thick of the rides and the game booths. There’s light and color and a raucous symphony of competing sounds, bells and jingles and the callers’ rhythmic solicitations. It’s Relena’s worst nightmare on a regular night, the smell of frying dough and childrens’ sticky fingers and the clatter of the roller coaster cars, a migraine made tangible. But there’s something in tonight, in the way she’d forgotten till halfway down the boardwalk that she was barefoot after all, in the way Hilde’s fingers brush featherlight against the sensitive skin on the inside of her arm, in the way they laugh over silly things like the ridiculous faces of cartoon frogs—there’s something in the tussle when Hilde forces her to eat a piece of cotton candy, in the way they lick the sugar from their lips, in the stars that have unfurled themselves over the glassy black ocean now that the sun is well and truly set.

It isn’t bad, this night. Even in the alien garb of a blouse and a pencil skirt, even with the lipstick long blotted from her lips, barefoot on the salt-weathered wood, Relena feels...beautiful, somehow. Hilde looks at her like she’s beautiful, like she belongs there amongst the technicolor carnival lights and the deep fryers and the rows of chintzy prizes.

So when Hilde leans in to whisper in her ear, Relena feels more giddy than awkward. More excited than bashful. She leans down into the soft whisper of breath against the sensitive shell of her ear and wonders how she’d missed it all these years, that sparkle in Hilde’s fox-sly eyes.

“Over there, look,” Hilde whispers, tipping her head at the other side of the boardwalk. She steps up behind Relena and loops an arm around her waist and leans around her shoulder to peer at the distant shape of two young men half-hidden in the shadow of the funhouse.

The braid is a giveaway at a distance; one of them is Hilde’s younger cousin, one of the boys who almost went away for life. Who didn’t, thanks to Relena.

“Is that—“ she says, taking a cautious step forward.

He’s pressed close to another boy, wiry but strong-looking, even at a distance, and taller than he was back when the case began. The boy with the depthless blue eyes, the sad somber boy whom Relena never once saw smile, let alone laugh. And she almost didn’t recognize him here, as he laughs against Duo’s lips, the both of them fumbling and laughing as they take what little comfort they can get in the imagined privacy of a shadow. The boys, whom life had aged so terribly, look once again like what they should have been all along: just a couple of goofy teenagers, carefree and humming with the energy of youth.

“They’re gonna be all right, Lena,” Hilde says. “They’re gonna be all right.”

Relena’s voice catches in her throat. She moves to swipe at the corners of her eyes and her fingers come back damp.

“Hey, hey,” Hilde says, hands smoothing up and down Relena’s arms. “C’mon, don’t cry. You’re gonna ruin all that pretty makeup.”

Relena lets out a wet laugh and sniffs, and Hilde creeps up on tiptoes to kiss the last errant tear from her cheek. Relena’s eyes go wide, cheeks apple pink and ears hot, hotter than the balmy summer night that curls the ends of Hilde’s hair. They pull back, startled, both of them reeling from what Hilde just did. And then in unison they lean in again, slow, eyes half-lidded and lips parted with shock and anticipation, and Hilde rocks up onto the balls of her feet again and—

“Miss Relena!” chirps a voice from behind them them.

They spring apart, Hilde stumbling, both of them wincing at the false start, and turn to face the voice’s source.

“I thought that was you,” the blonde boy says as he trots up to them.

“Hello, Quatre,” Relena says, nervously tucking her hair behind her ears.

“Hey kid,” Hilde says, clapping him on the shoulder.

“Nice to see you both,” Quatre says, smiling shyly. “I wasn’t interrupting, was—“

“Nope,” Hilde says just as Relena says, “Of course not.”

Quatre looks from one to the other and back again and smiles, ducking his head to hide his blush.

“You’re looking well,” Relena says, and it’s true. The boy’s filled out some, though he’s still on the petite side, and though there’s still a worldly depth to his sky-blue eyes, he moves a little lighter, a little less like the weight of the world presses down on him. “Did you hear back from the conservatory?”

Quatre beams.

“We were both accepted,” he says.

“How bout that,” Hilde says, grinning. “Couple a Mozarts. Don’t forget me when you’re rich and famous.”

Relena steps a little bit closer to Hilde, and Hilde answers by slipping her hand in the crook of Relena’s arm where it belongs.

“I’d say it’s pretty unlikely that we’ll end up rich or famous,” Quatre says with a fond smile. “But we could never forget you. Either of you.”

“It means a lot to me to hear that,” Relena says with a dip of her head.

Quatre shuffles his feet, a touch impatient under the impeccable manners.

“Go on, squirt,” Hilde says as she fluffs his hair. “Tell that brat of a cousin of mine not to stay out too late.”

“I will,” Quatre says, stepping back. “Goodbye, Miss Relena! Hilde!”

As they watch him leave, Hilde drops her head onto Relena’s shoulder and sighs.

“Why do I feel like we just shooed off our child.”

It’s an oddly appealing thought, and Relena smiles.

“They’re special, aren’t they,” she says, freeing her arm so she can slip it around Hilde’s shoulders.

“They sure are. But they’re not the only ones,” Hilde says, looking up into Relena’s eyes, a mischievous smile on her rosebud lips.

They find a shadow of their own this time, a little slant of dark between the water balloon darts and the ring toss. This time, when Hilde inches up to slot their lips together, Relena meets her half way—a proper start this time, a first step down a long long road. And Relena won’t forget, even by the end of it, years later, the smell of the salt sea air and the chatter of the roller coaster and the taste of Hilde’s mouth, cotton candy sweet and warmer than summer.

**Author's Note:**

> This one was born while listening to Don Henley’s Boys of Summer, hence the title. Some crushes just never die.
> 
> Much love to my very first very big fandom, and all the people therein. And love and gratitude to the Shooting Stars team for all the work they did for us and for the charities that received the zine proceeds!


End file.
